The present invention relates to a method of conveying products in equally spaced manner.
More specifically, the present invention relates to a method of conveying products in equally spaced manner to a user machine.
The present invention is especially suitable for use in the manufacture of soap or similar, to which specific reference is made in the following description purely by way of example.
In the soap industry, cakes of soap are supplied in equally spaced manner to a user machine, e.g. a wrapping machine, which presents an input conveyor traveling in a feed direction at a given substantially constant speed, and in turn normally presenting a succession of equally spaced pockets, each for housing a respective cake of soap.
The cakes are normally fed in orderly fashion to the input conveyor by a feed line of which the input conveyor forms the output element; and known feed lines normally comprise an ordering conveyor for conveying a succession of cakes at substantially constant speed by means of equally spaced pushers traveling with the ordering conveyor, and a transfer device for successively transferring the cakes from the output end of the ordering conveyor into respective pockets on the input conveyor.
The transfer device of known feed lines of the above type is normally defined by an overhead conveyor located over the output end of the ordering conveyor and the input end of the input conveyor, and presenting a succession of gripping heads successively cooperating with the cakes on the ordering conveyor, which normally comprises at least one endless belt fitted with the pushers. In general, each gripping head engages the respective cake just before the pusher rotates about the guide pulley of the belt to pass from the transportation branch to the return branch of the belt. Consequently, if the pushers project considerably outwards of the belt in relation to the thickness of the cakes, each pusher, as it rotates about the guide pulley, may possibly collide downwards with the cake that has just been removed, and so detach it from the gripping head.
To overcome the above drawback, known feed lines of the above type are normally specially designed for a given type of cake, i.e. the height of the pushers is normally determined as a function of the size of the cake being produced.